Windows 11 quick machine recovery: Restoring devices with boot issues
Microsoft has rolled out quick machine recovery, a new Windows feature aimed at preventing prolonged widespread outages like the one caused by a faulty CrowdStrike update in July 2024.
The goal of the feature is to allow IT administrators to remotely execute targeted fixes on machines that are unable to boot.
How does quick machine recovery work?
“With system failures, devices can sometimes get stuck in the Windows Recovery Environment (Windows RE), severely impacting productivity and often requiring IT teams to spend significant time troubleshooting and restoring affected machines,” Riddhi Ameser, Senior Program Manager at Microsoft, explained.
“With quick machine recovery, when a widespread outage affects devices from starting properly, Microsoft can broadly deploy targeted remediations to affected devices via Windows RE—automating fixes and quickly getting users to a productive state without requiring complex manual intervention.”
Quick machine recovery in the Advanced options menu for Windows RE (Source: Microsoft)
When an outage happens and quick machine recovery and automatic remediation is enabled, the device will enter the Windows recovery mode (WinRE) and establish communication with Microsoft’s recovery services.
At that point, Microsoft will analyze the device’s diagnostic data and the company’s response team will prepare a targeted remediation, which will be delivered via Windows Update, according to the update policies configured on the device.
IT admins can enable/disable the feature at will. They can even do it remotely – before an outage happens, of course.
“IT admins can prepopulate network credentials to ensure seamless delivery of automatic remediations. They can also configure the scanning interval, which checks for remediations (recommended: every 30 minutes), and the timeout, which determines when the device will restart (recommended: 72 hours, to optimize the remediation process),” Ameser added.
Quick machine recovery is still being tested
Quick machine recovery is currently provided for testing to users participating in the Windows Insider Program. Eventually, though, it will be available to IT admins managing devices running Windows 11 Pro and Enterprise, and enabled by default for Windows 11 Home devices.
Windows Insiders can start testing the feature by installing the latest Windows Insider Preview build in the Beta Channel for Windows 11, version 24H2.
“Keep an eye out for a test remediation package coming your way in the next few days, allowing you to experience the quick machine recovery feature in action,” Ameser instructed.